Detecting audio loops

Question

Hello there, I have a preexisting audio file that may contain loops. I'd like to know for certain. How can I detect repeating audio across a file?Can I "split" the file at the x-axis to look at the channels separately?  (The answer to the question in the picture is most likely "no," since it's just an example. I'd just like to know if Audition can help me finding out in any way, and if so, what I have to do for that.)

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted Answer

No, you really can't do it. This is audio we're talking about, and you have to listen to it to identify loops. You could have two identical sections of material that appeared on a spectrograph, but if there was an underlying change in the background sound behind them, for instance, or anything else mixed with them, then no auto-detecting software is ever going to isolate them. That's what you use your ears for.

SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Answer

I don't think you really understand how sound waveforms work, otherwise you wouldn't have posted a waveform with a positive-going section and a negative-going one highlighted and assumed that this could ever be a loop. That waveform you've shown is only of a single channel - there aren't two channels there at all. And a loop would have to be a repeat of a whole section of both the positive and negative sections of a waveform.

If you want to detect any examples of a loop, then first you will have to identify one. Then you will have to select the whole of it and teach it to Audition as a Sound Model, although this isn't going to allow you to pick up a large sample. At this point the Sound Removal tool might identify identical parts of the waveform - but it's really not that good at large, complicated sections, as it's really intended for small sounds that you might want to remove.

If I was going to identify anything that was repeated, I'd use my ears and then cut and paste the bits that I thought might be into a single file - they'd be relatively easy to detect then, and if there's any real doubt there's at least one more trick you can do which involves inverting one copy and pasting it over the other - if everything disappears, it's a direct copy.

But the whole process has to start with you identifying what you're looking for - no software will do this for you.

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